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Trump Quits Key Treaties Amid 'Increasingly Deadly and Expensive' Weather Disasters
"The Trump regime is sending a clear message to the world that the US refuses to take responsibility for its own actions," said one campaigner.
Jan 08, 2026
President Donald Trump's withdrawal of the United States from dozens of international treaties and organizations and his administration's cuts to climate research and emergency response come as the frequency, lethality, and cost of major extreme weather disasters grow, according to an analysis published Thursday.
The Climate Central analysis of billion-dollar US weather and climate disasters revealed that 2025 saw the third-highest annual number of such events, trailing only the two previous years. At least 276 deaths and $115 billion in damages are attributable to such disasters.
This analysis also came as California observed the one-year anniversary of wildfires that killed 31 people and caused billions of dollars in damages, making them among the most expensive wildfires on record.
The new research is the first update of Climate Central's US Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, which was launched last October. The resource will help fill an information void caused by the Trump administration's move in May ending updates to the government's own database that tracked climate disasters causing more than $1 billion in damage.
After the US admin cancelled the $B Climate + Weather Disaster dataset, @climatecentral.org hired the scientists who ran it and set it back up. Now the 2025 numbers are in: it's 3rd highest year on record and highest year w/o land-falling hurricanes. More: www.climatecentral.org/climate-serv...
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— Katharine Hayhoe (@katharinehayhoe.com) January 8, 2026 at 9:33 AM
Key findings of Climate Central's update include:
- The past three years rank highest for the annual number of billion-dollar disasters: 2023 (28 events), 2024 (27 events), and 2025 (23 events);
- The number of billion-dollar severe storms set a new record in 2025, with 21 such events, reflecting near-record numbers of damaging high wind and tornado reports during the spring and summer of 2025;
- A billion-dollar drought affected the western US in 2025, and was primarily driven by heat, rather than by a lack of precipitation; and
- The catastrophic flash flooding in the Texas Hill Country in July 2025 was one of the deadliest inland floods in US history—even though it did not even result in economic losses of $1 billion.
"This trend of increasingly deadly and expensive disasters is occurring as the Trump administration continues to defund and cut staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the nation’s foremost science agency whose mission includes tracking and studying weather and climate, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that prepares for, responds to, and helps communities recover from disasters," the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) said Thursday in response to the new research.
Additionally, Trump on Wednesday signed a legally dubious executive order under which the US will become the first country to ever quit the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the parent treaty serving as the foundation for international accords including the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement.
Trump's order also pulls the US from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), International Renewable Energy Agency & International Solar Alliance, International Union for Conservation of Nature, and numerous other agreements and organizations, even as the human-caused climate emergency worsens.
Experts stress that this is the opposite of what governments should be doing amid a worsening planetary crisis.
“As a nation, we must invest much more in resilience measures as well as sharply cut the heat-trapping emissions driving climate change," UCS Climate and Energy program senior policy director Rachel Cleetus said Thursday. "This administration has instead clawed back funding for climate resilience projects, politicized disaster aid, and is doing its utmost to boost fossil fuels and worsen the climate crisis. Congress must step up to oppose these harmful actions and help keep people safe.”
Basav Sen, a climate leader at the Institute for Policy Studies, on Thursday noted that the US is "the world’s largest cumulative greenhouse gas emitter, and the largest producer and exporter of oil and gas today."
"By walking away from the UNFCCC and the IPCC," Sen added, "the Trump regime is sending a clear message to the world that the US refuses to take responsibility for its own actions."
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Study Shows Glaciers Have Lost '3 Olympic Swimming Pools Per Second' Since 2000
One researcher said the findings support calls "for urgent and concrete actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and associated warming."
Feb 20, 2025
An international science project on Wednesday published a study in the journal Nature showing that glaciers have lost an average of 273 billion metric tons of ice annually since 2000—depleting freshwater resources, driving sea-level rise, and underscoring the need for sweeping global action to significantly reduce planet-heating pollution.
The Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (GlaMBIE) team compiled major studies to estimate global mass change from 2000, when glaciers—excluding Antarctica and Greenland's ice sheets—held about 121,728 billion metric tons of ice, to 2023.
The researchers found that during that period, the world lost 5% of all glacier ice, with regional losses for the full two decades ranging from 2% on the Antarctic and Subantarctic islands, to 39% in Central Europe.
That's a loss of 6,542 billion metric tons total or 273 billion metric tons per year, "the equivalent of three Olympic swimming pools per second," noted France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
Glaciologist Michael Zemp, who co-led the study, said in a statement that the annual figure "amounts to what the entire global population consumes in 30 years, assuming three liters per person and day."
"Every tenth of a degree warming that we avoid saves us money, saves us lives, saves us problems."
Although the researchers highlighted the annual average, they also emphasized that the rate of glacier ice loss "increased significantly" from 231 billion metric tons annually during the first half of the study period to 314 billion metric tons per year in the second half. In other words, the amount of ice being lost surged by 36% between the two ranges.
Zemp, a professor at Switzerland's University of Zurich and director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, told Agence France-Presse that the findings are "shocking" and warned that many smaller glaciers "will not survive the present century."
Stephen Plummer, an Earth observation applications scientist at the European Space Agency, said that "these findings are not only crucial for advancing our scientific understanding of global glacier changes, but also provide a valuable baseline to help regions address the challenges of managing scarce freshwater resources and contribute to developing effective mitigation strategies to combat rising sea level."
The ice loss over the GlaMBIE study's full timeline led to about 18 mm or 0.7 inches of sea-level rise. The researchers projected future losses that lead to 32-67 mm, or 1.26-2.6 inches, of sea-level rise by 2040.
"We are facing higher sea-level rise until the end of this century than expected before," Zemp told AFP, referring to the latest projection from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
"You have to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, it is as simple and as complicated as that," Zemp said. "Every tenth of a degree warming that we avoid saves us money, saves us lives, saves us problems."
The GlaMBIE project manager, Samuel Nussbaumer, similarly told Oceanographic that "our observations and recent modeling studies indicate that glacier mass loss will continue and possibly accelerate until the end of this century," which underpins the IPCC's "call for urgent and concrete actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and associated warming to limit the impact of glacier wastage on local geohazards, regional freshwater availability, and global sea-level rise."
The team's findings were released during the U.N.'s International Year of Glaciers' Preservation and the Decade of Action for Cryospheric Sciences—and they "will feed into the next IPCC report, due in 2029," according to CNRS.
Scientists from around the world who were not involved with the study were alarmed by its revelations—which come after the hottest year in human history and amid humanity's failure to curb planet-heating emissions, largely from fossil fuels.
Martin Siegert, a professor at the United Kingdom's University of Exeter, said in a statement that "this research is concerning to us, because it predicts further glacier loss, which can be considered like a 'canary in the coal mine' for ice sheet reaction to global warming and far more sea-level rise this century and beyond. The IPCC indicates 0.5-1 meters this century—but that is with a 66% certainty—hence 1/3 chance it could be higher under 'strong' warming, which unfortunately is the pathway we are on presently."
Andrew Shepherd, a professor at Northumbria University, another U.K. institution, explained that "glacier melting has two main impacts; it causes sea-level rise and it disrupts the water supply in rivers that are fed by meltwater."
"Around 2 billion people depend on meltwater from glaciers and so their retreat is a big problem for society—it's not just that we are losing them from our landscape, they are an important part of our daily lives," he said. "Even small amounts of sea-level rise matter because it leads to more frequent coastal flooding. Every centimeter of sea-level rise exposes another 2 million people to annual flooding somewhere on our planet."
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Green Groups Blast 'Reckless, Unscientific' EU Carbon Capture Plans
"Rejecting the influence of the fossil fuel industry and investing in climate action that can actually deliver emissions cuts and steer a just transition from the fossil fuel economy is crucial."
Oct 11, 2024
As attendees gathered in the south of France Thursday for the start of a European Union-hosted summit on carbon capture and storage, an international coalition of green groups warned against funding "reckless, unscientific, and lobbyist-driven" false climate solutions and instead urged investment in "a just transition that prioritizes renewable energy, energy demand reduction, and energy efficiency."
"Today the Industrial Carbon Management Forum (ICMF) kicks off in Pau, France," 43 organizations wrote in a letter to the European Commission. "This forum has been revealed to be dominated by fossil fuel interests to the exclusion of civil society stakeholders and other expert voices with critical views."
The letter points to a report published Thursday by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), which concluded that "most of Europe's planned carbon capture and storage (CCS) applications are too expensive to work on a commercial basis and are nowhere near ready to be rolled out."
According to the report, Europe's planned CCS projects will cost an estimated €520 billion ($569 billion), which IEEFA energy finance analyst and report author Andrew Reid said "will force European governments to introduce eye-wateringly high subsidies to prop up a technology that has a history of failure."
The green groups' letter also notes widespread criticism of CCS, which has been panned by Food & Water Watch—whose European branch signed the letter—as a "false climate solution" and a "lifeline for the fossil fuel industry."
The signers wrote that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "has labeled CCS as one of the most costly and least effective emissions reduction methods, and an Oxford study found high-CCS pathways could cost $30 trillion more globally than renewable alternatives," the signers wrote, referring to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The letter continues:
As well as being prohibitively expensive, plans for carbon capture and storage (CCS) at scale face overwhelming technical challenges and the records show 50 years of failure. Even with $83 billion in investment since the '90s, research found that nearly 80% of large-scale projects fail. The industry itself has acknowledged that for all these efforts, only 52 metric tons of carbon dioxide have ever been stored long-term, highlighting the unlikeliness of achieving the E.U.'s stated goal of storing 280 metric tons of CO2 by 2040...
The union has already spent over €3 billion ($3.3 billion) on CCS and hydrogen projects—hydrogen is often paired with CCS to attempt to capture the carbon dioxide emissions released during hydrogen production from fossil fuels in order to label hydrogen a low-carbon fuel. However, this ignores the ineffectiveness of CCS to reduce emissions and the continued use of fossil fuels in the process.
"We cannot afford to give further investments to the fossil fuel industry to gamble with our future and our tax money," the green groups stressed. "Money allotted to CCS would be better spent on the communities and countries that need it most and on ensuring a full and fair phaseout of fossil fuels."
In stark contrast, E.U. Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson said during the opening session of the CCS summit that the 27-nation bloc's climate target plan "underlines that industrial carbon management is not just an alternative, it is a vital complement to renewable energy and energy efficiency."
The letter's signers are calling on E.U. policymakers to:
- Stop wasting money on CCS projects and commit to a full phaseout of fossil fuels;
- Reject the influence of the fossil fuel industry;
- Commit to a full consideration of the scientific and real-world evidence of CCS' failures, limitations, and challenges; and
- Invest instead in real climate, health, and nature solutions that deliver a transition to a clean, healthy, and safe economy.
"The current fossil fuel industry influence on the E.U.'s carbon capture policy undermines the E.U.'s ability to meet its climate goals and responsibilities, and is damaging its reputation and leadership," the groups asserted. "Rejecting the influence of the fossil fuel industry and investing in climate action that can actually deliver emissions cuts and steer a just transition from the fossil fuel economy is crucial if the E.U. is to deliver real solutions for climate, nature, and people."
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How the Climate Crisis Is Shaping Geopolitics
Extreme weather events are displacing millions, creating new tensions between neighbors, and demanding coordinated military responses. Will world leaders do what is needed to meet the challenge?
Sep 22, 2024
Bangladesh was still reeling from political turmoil, which felled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government on August 5, when a flood disaster struck out of the blue, upending the lives of 6 million Bangladeshis. Half a million people were left to their own devices, beyond the reach of first responders. Worst of all, 2 million children were exposed to the aftermath of flooding. Dhaka had not seen a deluge like this in the past three decades. Yet the country is no stranger to disasters. Just in May this year, it was battered by Storm Remal, devastating millions. In 2023, it was Cyclone Mocha that visited its wrath on two neighboring states: Bangladesh and Myanmar.
The speed and severity of flash floods is equally quick to inflame geopolitical tensions, as Dhaka accused neighboring India aggravating the situation by opening the floodgates of a dam in a neighboring state. India denied the charge and blamed erratic monsoons for swelling the transboundary Gomati River that overflowed its banks. Bangladesh and India share 54 transboundary rivers, including the Ganges and Yamuna. As an upstream country, India is viewed with suspicion by downstream Bangladesh. All downstream nations suspect their upstream neighbors in the event of such calamities. For its part, India blames upstream China for major diversions on transboundary rivers. Similar accusations are heard among 11 riparian nations on the Nile. All this shows how climate change shapes geopolitics.
Each time a developing nation is struck by an epic calamity, it takes 10-20 years to fully recover from the impact. Disasters worsen the preexisting vulnerabilities of those affected, hindering their recovery. Viewing these impacts, Bangladesh estimates that 20 million of its citizens will become “climate refugees” in the next 25 years, while 30 million are set to lose everything from climate change. It wants Western nations to recognize climate refugees as they do victims of “political repression.” Rajendra Pachauri, a former chairperson of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), echoes Dhaka’s call for what he describes as “managed migration.” Unmanaged migration, however, continues. There are already 13 million Bangladeshis settled in Europe, North America, and the Middle East.
How ironic it is that 200 world leaders at the climate summit (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan this November, will be fighting tooth and nail to commit the least possible amount to the $100 billion global climate fund, which is basically a cleanup cost of climate change.
The ferocity of monsoons is forcing millions from their native habitats. Monsoons smash riverbanks, deluging countries on a monumental scale. Although shorter in duration, monsoons pack crushing punches. In 2022, southeastern Pakistan had received triple the amount of monthly rain in just one day. Monsoons are being fueled by the ever-warmer oceans that burst “atmospheric rivers.” The Bay of Bengal, where monsoons rise, and the Indian Ocean, which is the world’s fastest-warming ocean, are literally blazing. Asia’s sea surface temperature is warming more than three times faster than the global average. The continent’s land surface temperature has already surpassed the maximum threshold of 1.5°C to which the world agreed in Paris in 2015. Asia’s highest surface temperature in 2023 was recorded as 1.92°C above the 1961-1990 level (not the preindustrial level).
Asian countries such as Bangladesh, which have made the least contribution to carbonizing the atmosphere, are the most affected. In 2013, IPCC, in its fifth assessment report, predicted “less frequent but more intense” extreme weather events around the globe. Mother Nature, somehow, seems far ahead of the United Nations. As the case of Bangladesh shows, storms that are making landfalls around the world, are as frequent as they are intense. Weeks after the U.N.’s fifth assessment report came out, the Philippines endured typhoon Haiyan that killed 10,000 Filipinos, unleashing its fury on 13 million, 5 million of them children. Economic losses were valued at $15 billion (5% of the Philippine economy in 2013). Haiyan was then declared the strongest-ever superstorm in meteorological annals. Now scientists are thinking about adding a sixth hurricane category as Category 5 hurricanes are becoming passe.
Yet the world is far from equipped to tame climatic disasters. Haiyan, for instance, packed wind gusts of up to 235 miles per hour, a wind velocity that is almost twice the speed of the yet-to-be-invented Category 6 hurricane. Manila deployed 18,177 military troops, 844 vehicles, 44 seagoing vessels, and 31 aircraft to deal with the problem, and it still wasn’t enough. It had to call in military reinforcements from Australia, Britain, China, Japan, and the United States. The Philippines never faced a national adversary with a fraction of Haiyan’s lethality.
The United States committed the largest of all military resources to support the Philippines. It commissioned the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington with 80 aircraft and 5,000 troops aboard, in addition to four additional naval ships. Britain sent the Illustrious aircraft carrier stocked with transport planes and medical personnel. Japan sent a naval force of 1,000 troops, which was Tokyo’s largest-ever disaster-relief deployment, with three navy ships led by the Ise, Japan’s largest warship. Yet Haiyan kept all these naval deployments from entering the “disaster zone” for three days until November 11. By then, it had already made history as the Philippine deadliest storm.
Seven years later, in 2020, Australia had the lengthiest season of climate-driven wildfires, the intensity of which the The New York Times described in a breathtaking headline as “an atomic bomb.” For the first time in its history, Australia issued a “compulsory call-out” of its Defense Force Reserve Brigades, and deployed thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen to battle the raging fires and help evacuations. Yet the Australian military alone was no match for the blazes. Seventy countries, including Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United States, offered assistance. The economic cost of fires was put at $103 billion. Worst of all, 1 billion animals were burned to death in this climate-fueled inferno.
The Asia-Pacific is set to see the economic tab of climatic disasters double to $1.4 trillion a year (which is 4.2% of regional GDP). By the middle of the 21st century, the global toll of climate-driven calamities will reach $38 trillion a year. How ironic it is that 200 world leaders at the climate summit (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan this November, will be fighting tooth and nail to commit the least possible amount to the $100 billion global climate fund, which is basically a cleanup cost of climate change. Yet they have no remorse in having future generations pay $38 trillion a year as a penalty for climate breakdown. The cost of all wars, including world wars, fought in the 20th century is not nearly as much as this amount.
It is, however, heartening that the climate envoy John Podesta has announced U.S. support for Azerbaijan’s initiative of the New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance. In a U.S.-China Working Group meeting in Beijing in September, Podesta urged China to support this initiative. Both will cohost a summit of world leaders assembled at COP29 to urge more aggressive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. In all of this, climate change is defining itself in geopolitics.
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Study Shows How Climate-Mitigating Reforestation Can Be Done Much More Cheaply
New research shows that a mix of natural forest regrowth and tree planting could remove up to 10 times more carbon at $20 per metric ton than previously estimated by the IPCC.
Aug 18, 2024
Trees are allies in the struggle against climate change, and regrowing forests to capture carbon may be cheaper than we thought. According to new research published in Nature Climate Change, a strategic mix of natural regrowth and tree planting could be the most cost-effective way to capture carbon.
Researchers analyzed reforestation projects in 138 low- and middle-income countries to compare the costs of different reforestation approaches. They found it’s possible to remove 10 times more carbon at $20 per metric ton, and almost three times more at $50, compared to what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had previously estimated.
"It's exciting that the opportunity for low-cost reforestation appears much more plentiful than previously thought."
Neither natural regeneration nor tree planting consistently outperforms the other. Instead, the most cost-effective method varies depending on local conditions. Natural regeneration, which involves letting forests regrow on their own, is cheaper in about 46% of suitable areas. Tree planting, on the other hand, is more cost-effective in 54% of areas.
“Natural regeneration is more cost-effective in areas where tree planting is expensive, regrowing forests accumulate carbon more quickly, or timber infrastructure is distant,” said lead author Jonah Busch, who conducted the study while working for Conservation International. “On the other hand, plantations outperform in areas far from natural seed sources, or where more of the carbon from harvested wood is stored in long-lasting products.”
The research team estimates that by using the cheapest method in each location, we could remove a staggering 31.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over 30 years, at a cost of less than $50 per metric ton. This is about 40% more carbon removal than if only one method was used universally.
“It’s exciting that the opportunity for low-cost reforestation appears much more plentiful than previously thought; this suggests reforestation projects are worth a second look by communities that might have prejudged them to be cost prohibitive,” said Busch. “While reforestation can’t be the only solution to climate change, our findings suggest it should be a bigger piece of the puzzle than previously thought.”
To reach these conclusions, the research team gathered data from hundreds of reforestation projects and used machine-learning techniques to map costs across different areas at a 1-kilometer (0.6-mile) resolution. This detailed approach allowed them to consider crucial factors such as tree growth rates and potential species in different regions.
Ecologist Robin Chazdon, who wasn’t involved in the research, praised the comprehensive approach but highlighted important considerations beyond cost-effectiveness.
“These eye-opening findings add nuance and complexity to our understanding of the net costs of carbon storage for naturally regenerating forests and monoculture plantations,” Chazdon said. However, she emphasized that “the relative costs of carbon storage should not be the only factor to consider regarding spatial planning of reforestation.”
Chazdon pointed out some of the ecological trade-offs involved in different reforestation methods. Monoculture tree plantations, while potentially cost-effective in certain areas, often create excessive water demand and provide poor opportunities for native biodiversity conservation. In contrast, naturally regenerating forests typically offer a wider range of ecosystem services and better support local biodiversity.
“Ultimately, these environmental costs and benefits — which can be difficult to monetize — need to be incorporated in decisions regarding how and where to grow plantations or foster natural regeneration,” Chazdon said.
The study’s authors acknowledge these limitations and suggest several directions for future research. They propose extending the analysis to high-income countries and exploring other forms of reforestation, such as agroforestry or planting patches of trees and allowing the rest of an area to regrow naturally.
Additionally, the researchers emphasize the need to integrate their findings on cost-effectiveness with data on biodiversity, livelihoods and other societal needs to guide reforestation efforts in different contexts.
While the study’s findings are promising, the researchers caution that reforestation alone won’t solve the climate crisis. Even at its maximum potential, reforestation would only remove as much carbon dioxide in 30 years as eight months of current global emissions.
Reforestation is very important, but it won’t solve climate change on its own, Busch said. Ultimately, “we still need to reduce emissions from fossil fuels.”
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13 Months of Record-Smashing Heat Called 'Another Red Alert' for Humanity
"This alarming record underlines the need to urgently phase out fossil fuels, and to hugely increase climate finance," said one campaigner.
Jul 08, 2024
Scientists on Monday underscored the urgent need to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy following the publication of data from the European Union's climate change monitor showing that last month was the hottest June ever recorded and that 2024 is likely to be the planet's hottest year on record.
Each month since June 2023 has been the hottest since records have been kept, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said last week in its latest monthly bulletin.
According to the agency, June "was 1.50°C above the estimated June average for 1850-1900, the designated preindustrial reference period, making it the 12th consecutive month to reach or break the 1.5°C threshold."
"European temperatures were most above average over southeast regions and Turkey, but near or below average over western Europe, Iceland, and northwestern Russia," C3S noted. "Outside Europe, temperatures were most above average over eastern Canada, the western United States and Mexico, Brazil, northern Siberia, the Middle East, northern Africa, and western Antarctica."
"Temperatures were below average over the eastern equatorial Pacific, indicating a developing La Niña, but air temperatures over the ocean remained at an unusually high level over many regions," the agency added.
C3S Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement Monday that "even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm."
"This is inevitable unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans," he stressed.
In an interview with The Associated Press published Monday, C3S climate scientist Nicolas Julien called the new data "a stark warning that we are getting closer to this very important limit set by the Paris agreement."
"The global temperature continues to increase," he added. "It has at a rapid pace."
Zeke Hausfather, a researcher at the California-based nonprofit Berkeley Earth, told Reuters, "I now estimate that there is an approximately 95% chance that 2024 beats 2023 to be the warmest year since global surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s."
As Reuters reported Monday:
The changed climate has already unleashed disastrous consequences around the world in 2024. More than 1,000 people died in fierce heat during the Hajj pilgrimage last month. Heat deaths were recorded in New Dehli, which endured an unprecedentedly long heatwave, and amongst tourists in Greece.
"This is not good news at all," Aditi Mukherji, who co-authored the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, told The Guardian.
"We know that extreme events increase with every increment of global warming," she added, "and at 1.5°C, we witnessed some of the hottest extremes this year."
The Guardian surveyed hundreds of IPCC authors earlier this year. Three-quarters of them said they expect Earth to heat by at least 2.5°C by the end of this century. Half of the surveyed scientists expect temperatures to rise above 3°C by 2100.
"It is a crisis," said Mukherji, and one that has a clear solution, given that burning fossil fuels is the leading cause of global heating.
Antonia Juhasz, a senior researcher on fossil fuels at Human Rights Watch, told Nation of Change that "as a result of the burning of fossil fuels, heatwaves are becoming more common, and intense heatwaves are more frequent."
"We can break the cycle, we can make oil companies stop burning fossil fuels," she added.
Reacting to the latest C3S data, Amnesty International climate adviser Ann Harrison said on social media that "this alarming record underlines the need to urgently phase out fossil fuels, and to hugely increase climate finance."
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Scientists Blockade EU Commission Offices to Demand Degrowth
Amid elections in Europe, opponents of ongoing planetary destruction argue that the "science is clear: politicians' obsession with infinite economic growth is leading us straight to disaster."
Jun 07, 2024
A group of about 20 scientists and allies on Friday blocked the doors to the European Commission office in Brussels to demand degrowth policies as European Union elections unfold in which no party has such an agenda and pro-environment candidates are expected to lose seats.
The degrowth advocates, who came from Scientist Rebellion and affiliated groups, called for the EU to stop using Gross Domestic Product as an index of prosperity and an end to "over-consumption and the advertising that drives it," among other demands. Carrying placards with messages such as "Green growth is a myth," they prevented employees of the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, from getting to work Friday morning, they said in an emailed statement.
Wolfgang Cramer, an environmental geographer at the Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology in France and an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) author, supported the action from a distance.
"Economic growth is a concept that was useful almost 100 years ago to help politicians overcome the disaster of the 1929 world economic crisis," Cramer said, according to the statement. "Today, it has become a leitmotif to justify the destruction of our natural resources and to support the redistribution of wealth to the richest. What we need is an economic system that guarantees the well-being of everyone, while respecting the planet's limits. This is entirely possible if we have the political will."
The degrowth movement, which began in the 2000s following work in the field of ecological economics, seeks to address not only the climate crisis but also other ecological crises. Its proponents argue that economic growth is linked with energy and resource use—the more growth, the more difficult to stay within planetary limits on carbon emissions, or, for example, nitrogen and phosphorous use, they argue.
Degrowth is the subject of mockery in some legacy media outlets that hold economic growth sacrosanct and is a matter of fierce debate among leftist political thinkers, some of whom strongly oppose it. Despite the criticism, degrowth has grown in influence, especially in Europe, where the topic has moved from the "policy fringes" toward a "mainstream audience," Financial Times reported last year. The economic paradigm questioning endless expansion has even received favorable mention in EU policy briefs and IPCC reports.
"It is unlikely that a long-lasting, absolute decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures and impacts can be achieved at the global scale,” a European Environment Agency briefing says. "Therefore, societies need to rethink what is meant by growth and progress and their meaning for global sustainability."
Many climate policy researchers are in fact skeptical of "green growth" and support "growth agnostic" or degrowth policies, a 2023 study in Nature Sustainability found.
In a manifesto Scientist Rebellion pointed to on Friday, the group argued that, "The science is clear: politicians' obsession with infinite economic growth is leading us straight to disaster."
Científicos de @ScientistRebel1, @ExtinctionR y @growth_kills bloquearon esta mañana la entrada de la Comisión Europea. Lamentan que, en estas elecciones, ninguna partido proponga el decrecimiento como salida a la crisis climática.
Las 5 demandas:
1) Abandonar el PIB como… pic.twitter.com/y07yUjLxI2
— Andrés Actis (@ActisAndres) June 7, 2024
The group's Friday action comes on the second day of this week's EU elections, which run from Thursday to Sunday. Right-wing parties are pushing anti-environment messages with great success, The New York Times reported Friday.
"The right wing is ascendant," according to the Times, which explained that the European Greens are polling poorly this year, after having won a record 10% of seats in the EU Parliament in 2019—a year of large climate protests, when the "zeitgeist was green."
That victory helped propel the EU toward the European Green Deal, a set of environmental laws and regulations centered around a legally binding target to reduce emissions by 55% by 2030.
However, inflation and high energy prices due to the war in Ukraine have changed some of the political dynamics. Rising prices have helped lead to what the European Council on Foreign Relations has called a “growing greenlash.”
Ahead of the elections, farmers' groups have protested regulations on agricultural pollutants, showing that "agriculture has been instrumentalized by the populist and hard-right groups throughout the 27-nation bloc," The Associated Press reported.
Yet climate activist groups remain determined to push forward. Scientist Rebellion seeks to draw attention to what it sees as the blind spots in the political platforms of even Europe's left-wing and green parties.
"We deplore the fact that virtually no party is proposing a program that is up to the social and environmental challenge," said Laura Stalenhoef, a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive psychology in Germany who took part in Friday's action. "But we do not just denounce political inaction, we put forward concrete proposals for change: we urgently need to abandon GDP as an index of prosperity and organise a voluntary contraction of the economy before we witness ecological and social collapse."
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Rate of Global Warming Reaches All-Time High, Report Shows
"The devastation wrought by wildfires, drought, flooding, and heatwaves the world saw in 2023 must not become the new normal," the report's author said.
Jun 05, 2024
Climate scientists published a report Wednesday showing that the rate of global warming reached an all-time high in the 10 years up to and including 2023 and that the record-breaking heat of last year was primarily due to that human-caused heating rather than other factors such as El Niño.
The scientists found that from 2014 to 2023, the Earth warmed 0.26°C—higher than any previous 10-year period. The report, published in Earth System Science Data, was completed by 57 scientists who used the methods of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produces major reports only every five to 10 years, with the next one expected in 2027. The report authors sought to fill the gap and, at least in one case, to galvanize climate action.
"Rapidly reducing emissions of greenhouse gases towards net zero will limit the level of global warming we ultimately experience. At the same time, we need to build more resilient societies," lead author Piers Forster, a climate physicist at the University of Leeds in the U.K. and an IPCC author, said in a statement. "The devastation wrought by wildfires, drought, flooding, and heatwaves the world saw in 2023 must not become the new normal."
Over the course of 2023, temperatures were on average 1.43°C above preindustrial levels, Forster and co-authors found, with an estimated 1.31°C of that due to human-caused global warming, and the relatively small remainder due to variability from events such as El Niño and La Niña.
The report also shows that the Earth's remaining "carbon budget"—how much can be emitted before reaching 1.5°C of warming, the Paris agreement target—is now roughly 200 gigatonnes, which will take only five years or so for the global population to use. This is down from the 500 gigatonnes that the IPCC estimated remained in the budget as of 2020.
Adam Vaughan, environment editor at The Times, a U.K. newspaper, drew attention to the short time period in which humanity has to act, writing on social media that the 1.5°C target could be "blown" if emissions didn't go down.
Global warming is advancing at its fastest since modern records began 174 years ago, according to a leading team of climate scientists inc @piersforster. They also found the carbon budget for 1.5C will be blown in around 5 years if emissions stay at current record level pic.twitter.com/7ziiNng0Ok
— Adam Vaughan (@adamvaughan_uk) June 5, 2024
In a guest post in Carbon Brief, Forster and another co-author explained that their report was "nothing short of alarming, yet it does contain some encouraging news."
" Greenhouse gas emissions have not yet risen beyond pre-pandemic levels and there is evidence that the rate of increase in CO2 emissions over the past decade has slowed compared to the 2000s," they said.
Forster, who also led the annual report in its first iteration last year, spoke to reporters in such a way as to avoid doomsday rhetoric.
"If you look at this world accelerating or going through a big tipping point, things aren't doing that," he told The Associated Press. "Things are increasing in temperature and getting worse in sort of exactly the way we predicted."
However, the climate news remains dire: Researchers working with even more up-to-date data—through May—have found that the average temperature increase above preindustrial levels is now 1.6°C, and each of the last 12 months has been the hottest on record for that month. Those findings are from data released by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service and reported by The Washington Post.
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'Wake-Up Call for the World': Millions Impacted by Extreme Floods in Brazil
"This is not a disaster of Brazil's making. The whole planet is experiencing increasingly rapid climate changes due largely to the greenhouse gases produced by a handful of wealthy nations," one expert said.
May 20, 2024
Experts emphasized the escalating risks of climate-related disasters and their disproportionate impacts on low-income people on Monday following flooding in Brazil that has killed at least 150 people and displaced more than 600,000.
The floods that hit over recent days and weeks have knocked out bridges and the main airport in Porto Alegre, a port city in southern Brazil. More than 460 of the 497 municipalities in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sol have been affected, with more than 2 million people impacted, according to provisional government data.
"The situation is catastrophic," said Rachel Soeiro, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) medical coordinator in Brazil, who visited the area by helicopter. "We were able to view the towns from above and noticed that in some cases we couldn't even see the roofs of houses.”
More than two feet of rain has fallen so far this month, according Brazil's national weather service, inundating large areas.
"Whole towns and large, urban city centers are in some cases almost completely underwater," the BBC reported on Saturday.
We joined an emergency services helicopter rescuing people from Brazil's floods. The rescues themselves are fraught with risks. More than half a million people are displaced.
Watch on @BBCNews at 6 today (on at 1705) or catch up on the News at One.
Whole cities are destroyed👇 pic.twitter.com/hxZYSVDDmz
— Ione Wells (@ionewells) May 19, 2024
Experts connected the extreme rainfall to climate change, which increases the likelihood of such weather events. Incidents of extreme flooding have increased "sharply" across the planet in the last two decades, according to a study in Nature Water released last year.
"In many ways, this is not a disaster of Brazil’s making. The whole planet is experiencing increasingly rapid climate changes due largely to the greenhouse gases produced by a handful of wealthy nations," Cristiane Fontes (Krika), executive director of World Resources Institute (WRI) Brasil, wrote in a commentary earlier this month in which she called the situation a "wake-up call for the world."
In recent weeks, flooding has also hit China, the United Arab Emirates, and Australia, and WRI's staff in Kenya are dealing with dam breaches from heavy rains, Fontes noted.
A Brazilian expert indicated that the flooding, catastrophic as it has been, should not come as a surprise.
"People on the streets here in Brazil, they've attributed this change to global climate change driven by the increase of fossil fuels," Paulo Artaxo, a physics professor at the University of Sao Paulo, and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He explained that was in line with IPCC projections showing that southern Brazil would face more extreme rainfall due to tropical and polar currents.
In Brazil, as elsewhere, climate impacts are not evenly distributed. MSF relief efforts are focused on the most vulnerable, including Indigenous communities, one of which had been isolated by rising waters and without help for 10 days before being reached by the humanitarian group.
"Assisting those who are most vulnerable is one of our main concerns in such situations," Soeiro said. "These people were already facing difficult situations before the flooding. But their needs have risen further and access to them has become more difficult."
Some wealthy people in Porto Alegre have choices such as escaping to a second home, but in "rundown towns" on the city's periphery, low-income people have no such options, according to CNN.
Brazilian left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has pledged to provide relief money to families that lost their homes. Brazil is one of most unequal countries in the world, according to World Bank data.
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77% of Top Climate Scientists Think 2.5°C of Warming Is Coming—And They're Horrified
"I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South," one expert said.
May 08, 2024
Nearly 80% of top-level climate scientists expect that global temperatures will rise by at least 2.5°C by 2100, while only 6% thought the world would succeed in limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, a survey published Wednesday by The Guardian revealed.
Nearly three-quarters blamed world leaders' insufficient action on a lack of political will, while 60% said that corporate interests such as fossil fuel companies were interfering with progress.
"I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South," one South African scientist told The Guardian. "The world's response to date is reprehensible—we live in an age of fools."
"What blew me away was the level of personal anguish among the experts who have dedicated their lives to climate research."
The survey was conducted by The Guardian's Damian Carrington, who reached out to every expert who had served as a senior author on an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report since 2018. Out of 843 scientists whose contact information was available, 383 responded.
He then asked them how high they thought temperatures would rise by 2100: 77% predicted at least 2.5°C and nearly half predicted 3°C or more.
"What blew me away was the level of personal anguish among the experts who have dedicated their lives to climate research," Carrington wrote on social media. "Many used words like hopeless, broken, infuriated, scared, overwhelmed."
The 1.5°C target was agreed to as the most ambitious goal of the Paris agreement of 2015, in which world leaders pledged to keep warming to "well below" 2°C. However, policies currently in place would put the world on track for 3°C, and unconditional commitments under the Paris agreement for 2.9°C.
The survey comes on the heels of the hottest year on record, which already saw a record-breaking Canadian wildfire season as well as extreme, widespread heatwaves and deadly floods. The first four months of 2024 have also been the hottest of their respective months on record, and the year has already seen the fourth global bleaching event for coral reefs.
"They can say they don't care, but they can't say they didn't know."
"I think we are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years," Gretta Pecl of the University of Tasmania told The Guardian. "[Authorities] will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future."
Scientists said that governments and companies that profit from the burning of fossil fuels had prevented action. Many also blamed global inequality and the refusal of the wealthy world to step up, both in terms of reducing their own emissions and helping climate vulnerable nations adapt.
"The tacit calculus of decision-makers, particularly in the Anglosphere—U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia—but also Russia and the major fossil fuel producers in the Middle East, is driving us into a world in which the vulnerable will suffer, while the well-heeled will hope to stay safe above the waterline," Stephen Humphreys at the London School of Economics said.
Despite their grim predictions, many of the scientists remained committed to researching and speaking out.
"We keep doing it because we have to do it, so [the powerful] cannot say that they didn't know," Ruth Cerezo-Mota, who works on climate modeling at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told The Guardian. "We know what we're talking about. They can say they don't care, but they can't say they didn't know."
Others found hope in the climate activism and awareness of younger generations, and in the finding that each extra tenth of a degree of warming avoided protects 140 million people from extreme temperatures.
"I regularly face moments of despair and guilt of not managing to make things change more rapidly, and these feelings have become even stronger since I became a father," said Henri Waisman of France's Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations. "But, in these moments, two things help me: remembering how much progress has happened since I started to work on the topic in 2005 and that every tenth of a degree matters a lot—this means it is still useful to continue the fight."
Peter Cox of the University of Exeter added: "Climate change will not suddenly become dangerous at 1.5°C—it already is. And it will not be 'game over' if we pass 2°C, which we might well do."
"I'm not despairing, I'm not giving up. I'm pissed off and more determined to fight for a better world."
Many of the scientists who still saw a hope of keeping 1.5°C alive pinned it on the speeding rollout and falling prices of climate-friendly technologies like renewable energy and electric vehicles. Also on Wednesday, energy think thank Ember reported that 30% of global electricity came from renewables in 2023 and predicted that the year would be the "pivot" after which power sector emissions would start to fall. Experts also said that abandoning fossil fuels has many side benefits such as cleaner air and better public health. Though even the more optimistic scientists were wary about the unpredictable nature of the climate crisis.
"I am convinced that we have all the solutions needed for a 1.5°C path and that we will implement them in the coming 20 years," Henry Neufeldt of the United Nations' Copenhagen Climate Center told The Guardian. "But I fear that our actions might come too late and we cross one or several tipping points."
Several scientists gave recommendations for things that people could do to move the needle on climate. Humphreys suggested "civil disobedience" while one French scientist said people should "fight for a fairer world."
"All of humanity needs to come together and cooperate—this is a monumental opportunity to put differences aside and work together," Louis Verchot, based at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia, told The Guardian. "Unfortunately climate change has become a political wedge issue… I wonder how deep the crisis needs to become before we all start rowing in the same direction."
The publication of The Guardian's survey prompted other climate scientists to share their thoughts.
"As many of the scientists pointed out, the uncertainty in future temperature change is not a physical science question: It is a question of the decisions people choose to make," Texas Tech University climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote on social media. "We are not experts in that; And we have little reason to feel positive about those, since we have been warning of the risks for decades."
Aaron Thierry, a graduate researcher at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences, pointed out that The Guardian's results were consistent with other surveys of scientific opinion, such as one published in Nature in the lead-up to COP26, in which 60% of IPCC scientists said they expected 3°C of warming or more by 2100.
James Dyke of the University of Exeter's Global Systems Institute argued that there was room for scientists to share more negative thoughts without succumbing to or encouraging defeatism.
"I hear the argument that we must temper these messages because we don't want people to despair and give up. But I'm not despairing, I'm not giving up. I'm pissed off and more determined to fight for a better world," Dyke said on social media.
NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus shared the article with a plea to "please start listening."
"Elected and corporate 'leaders' continue to prioritize their personal power and wealth at the cost of irreversible loss of essentially everything, even as this irreversible loss comes more and more into focus. I see this as literally a form of insanity," Kalmus wrote, adding that "capitalism tends to elevate the worst among us into the seats of power."
However, he took issue with the idea that a future of unchecked climate change would be only "semi-dystopian."
"We're also at risk of losing any gradual bending toward progress, and equity, and compassion, and love," Kalmus said. "All social and cultural struggles must recognize this deep intersection with the climate struggle."
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